Posts Tagged ‘Education’

What are the media doing canonizing an 11 year-old for doing a drag routine in a gay bar?

The point of this story is not the courage and individuality of an 11-year-old. There are plenty of positive ways one could capture a story about an 11-year-old’s gender journey than having the child having money thrown at him while he does a drag queen inspired strip at a pub.

And my objection has nothing to do with the fact it was at a gay bar and that the boy is a drag queen.

My objections are as follows:

Doing a drag show is fine when it’s adults participating – not children. Drag shows are highly sexualised in nature and children should never be a subject of sexualised activity.

The fact that money was thrown at him is sick. It is a pedophilic act and it is totally unacceptable. To then celebrate this response as a a symbol of the child’s ability to entertain an audience is downright irresponsible. I would feel exactly the same way if it was an 11 year-old girl at a straight pub.

Watching the ABC’s treatment of this story in the video above makes me wonder how serious the media are about protecting children from the dangers of being represented as sexual beings.

From early on, kids witness some of the worst things this world has to offer. Suffering, death, divorce, bullying, climate change and poverty. Preparing kids for these inevitabilities and guiding them through managing these issues is part of the learning and maturing process.

But there also needs to be a fair and real representation of all the good things about experiencing the world. Children must be directed to acts of goodness, courage and devotion as examples of the inherent potential in people, and by extension in themselves.

Imagine you’ve just lost one of your most prized possessions at the busiest place around town – the airport. That’s what happened to 8-year-old August Bridges – or Gussie, as her family calls her – last week.

Gussie was sitting at a table inside the Norfolk International Airport with her mom and dad, Kelly and Jonathan Bridges, and her favorite stuffed animal, a small, furry dog named Cookie Dough.

After the family members they were waiting for made their way through the terminal, the group headed for the exit.

Not until the drive home to Virginia Beach did Gussie realize she’d left her toy pup behind.

“I thought she was going to cry,” Kelly said. “She had just got it a few weeks ago out of one of those claw machines at Chicho’s Pizza with her dad, and she was really attached to it.”

Kelly reached for her phone to call the airport’s lost and found desk. They said an airport police officer was on the case of the missing stuffed dog.

Before long, the airport police called Kelly back and told her Cookie Dough had been spotted.

When Jonathan and Gussie went back to retrieve the toy a couple of days later, they found out that Cookie Dough had been pretty busy.

Airport officers had made the dog an honorary policeman for a day and taken pictures to prove it. To show Gussie what her toy had been up to, the officers compiled the photographic evidence in a book.

There were photos of Cookie Dough dressed up as an airport firefighter, driving luggage-carrying carts and even sliding down the escalator rail.

“I’m having fun,” Cookie Dough said, “but don’t try this at home!”

The dog visited some new stuffed animal friends in the gift shop and stopped by the United Service Organizations center.

The officers fed him apples and taught him how to say the Pledge of Allegiance, too.

Beneath a picture of the toy dog staring out over the landing strip, the book read, “Watching the planes just come and go … until you come back to me.”

“They told us he had been on lots of adventures, but we didn’t think it would be anything like this,” Kelly said.

Steve Sterling, deputy executive director of administration and operations for the Norfolk Airport Authority, said the officers saw the opportunity to do something special.

“We knew that the girl’s parents had communicated that she was upset about the lost toy,” Sterling said. “So the dispatcher and police officers just wanted to put a special touch on returning the toy.”

Gussie was thrilled to have her stuffed dog back, Kelly said, but she and her husband were just as impressed by their creativity and kindness.

“It meant a lot to all of us,” Kelly said. “It was just awesome what they did for Gussie.”

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Thank you Dr. Jessica Smock for being the inspiration behind my most daring and interesting homework idea yet.

I have never been a big fan of homework. If my school didn’t have a homework policy and I could be convinced that my students would use the extra time at home doing something more constructive than playing video games and binge watching Netflix series, I would be quite comfortable to excuse my students from having to submit weekly homework tasks.

But then I read an article that would allow me to give an anti-homework form of homework. The article written by Dr. Smock, entitled, “31 Things Your Kids Should be Doing Instead of Homework“, charts a series of activities from playing an instrument to hanging out with a grandparent that our kids could be doing in the place of homework. It also explains why these alternate activities are better for the child’s health and development. It’s a wonderful article.

After reading it, I immediately came up with a plan. What if I give 2 weeks for my students to complete and document all 31 tasks. For the tricky ones like learning to knit or volunteering at an animal shelter they could use their imagination and come up with alternatives which are true to the spirit of the ones listed.

My students loved the idea. I have never seen them so enthusiastic about homework. Every day for 2 weeks we had informal discussions about how many items each child had managed to document and how they cleverly negotiated some of the activities which were difficult for them to perform.

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When you begin teaching your 5th or 6th Grade Math class, you often start with a high dose of ego.

You tell yourself that you can easily set any struggling student right by carefully and clearly explaining the skills and processes involved.

And then reality sinks in. It’s clearly not as easy as that.

There is a reason why your struggling students have continued to struggle throughout their first 5 or so years of schooling. It’s not the strength of the teachers they’ve encountered, because chances are, there have been some extremely adept teachers who have used tried and true methods for helping those student bridge the ever widening gaps.

Many teachers have expressed a reluctance of teaching 5th sand 6th Grade Math due to the introduction of concepts and skills which many Primary teachers find difficult. In truth, the major test of a 5th or 6th Grade teacher is not the skills itself, but rather the challenge of helping students learn skills they haven’t been able to grasp from their talented and competent previous teachers.

In order to cut through, teachers are therefore required to change things up. To employ slightly different ways of teaching the same skill. The following are some adjustments that work for me.

Integrate the Skill in a Game – Kids love winning and try to avoid losing at all cost. Game play provides an incentive for children to learn skills that they may have ordinarily have claimed was too difficult. Dice games are the best because it provides a randomness that allows weaker students to often prevail over stronger students. I am constantly blown away by how effective game play is to break through to kids who usually struggle with Math.

Change the wording – The wording of Math is so scientific and technical. Does it have to be? Absolutely not. So change it up. Instead of numerator and denominator, I use top bunk and bottom bunk. It helps. It doesn’t mean I will never teach them the right terminology, it just means I am more focused on the skill that the wording which can often intimidate.

Reinforce the Objectives of Math – There is a reason why Math was invented and kids need to know that to be able to relate to it. I tell my students Math was invented for 2 main purposes. Firstly, to save us time. So instead of having to add 7 +7 a total of 8 times, I can just apply the sum 7×8, which is much quicker and easier. And secondly, for fairness. When I am dividing a birthday cake, everyone wants an equal sized piece. It turns out that children deeply value fairness and relate to the idea of resorting to shortcuts. Why not then explain how the skill of the day fits into one or both of the above categories?

Bite Sized Pieces – I can’t tell you how many students I have confronted in the upper years who weren’t able to read time from an analogue clock. The big mistake, as I eluded to earlier, is to think that a careful and patient demonstration of what the big and little hands tell us will work. Again, you can bet that plenty of highly competent teachers have tried without success. My strategy is to break up the skill into small, bite-sized pieces. I tell them to ignore the hour hand. Pretend it doesn’t exist. Just focus on the minute hand. The next step is to show them the function of the minute hand and not move on until they get it. Only then do I introduce the hour hand. The problem that I have found is that reading an analogue clock involves a level of multitasking which kids (boys especially) find very intimidating. Take it slowly. One skill at a time. They respond better to that.

Use What They Know – Students tend to do much better with currency than decimals. This is quite ironic, as decimals and currency are essentially the same thing. I tell all my students who struggle with decimals to pretend that 0.75 for example, is 75 cents. It helps! Math professors would be irate if they found out I was doing this. They would remind me that students will become unstuck when they encounter a decimal like 0.751, which doesn’t work with the currency technique. So what! Once I have taught them through currency their confidence levels are so high, I have found they are quite receptive to learning the differences that exist between decimals and money.

By the time your students have reached 5th Grade, they already have a sense for whether they like a subject and whether they are proficient at it. It’s so hard to turn the unconfident and unenthusiastic learners around.

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So a science teacher causes a fire in the name of a fairly interesting looking scientific demonstration.

The fire department was called and it would have been an utterly humiliating experience for teacher and school alike (not to mention a costly one).

I hope his boss does something very counter intuitive and congratulates him on his lesson. It’s so easy to conduct a boring, safe and incident free science lesson. Many science teachers go for that option only to find out that their class has lost interest and turned to their mobile phones to pass the time.

All teachers make mistakes, but the good ones are prepared to make them in order to teach in an engaging and enlightening way.

I hope he tried the very same experiment all over again the very next day!

The Trump fake news award sideshow has come and gone, and depending what camp you’re in it was either fabulous or a further indication of the man’s deep psychological issues.

Teachers are now more than ever encouraged to teach analysis of news in the classroom. Teachers are given the job of helping their students to identify fake news and find bias where it exists.

But this is a very problematic area for teachers.

Teachers are not allowed to promote or even subtly convey their own political allegiances. This presents a difficulty. Usually the fine line between fact and fakery is in the eye of the beholder. Someone of the right will not see the bias in a right leaning news story and vice versa.

I believe that whilst it is very important that our students have the tools to identify bias and fake news, we should refrain from pointing out concrete examples.

Give them the skills, but resist at all costs in taking on our own personal political beliefs.

One can understand why. When a person tries to regroup from a near trauma, they go to comedy to help them manage the shock.

But there is one section of the population that wont want to make light of this episode – young children. The kind that I teach in Primary school.

They wont get the humor and will be perplexed (and often wounded) by the story if it isn’t explained in a discrete and careful manner. The worst thing in the world a parent could do is make light of it or laugh it off. That wont work for children.

The best way to deal with it is to explain that sometimes adults believe things that make no sense. That a missile is never going to hit Hawaii and adults were so surprised by the message that they lost all common sense.

But isn’t that lying?

I feel that this white lie is imperative. Children must have it reinforced that their homes are not going to be pelted with missiles. Not now. Not ever.

I cannot believe how stupid some policy makers are. Banning students from having best friends? Really?

I thought schools were supposed to prepare children for the real world.

Imagine if schools banned teachers from mixing with their favourite colleagues! Because don’t think for a second that teachers don’t operate in cliques just like their students do. Our students see double standards from a mile away, and any rule which prevents them from doing normal, everyday things that their teachers do, irks them no end.

The way to look after isolated and lonely students is not to save them by draconian laws that reduce the school experience for others. It is to invest as teachers in building their self-esteem and promoting them to the rest of the school community. You don’t need to impose bans to help these students. You just need to care enough about them to help them find their place in the school.

Members of the royal family aren’t often told what they can and can’t do. But just a few days into his first year of school, 4-year-old Prince George already faces a mandate: No best friends allowed.

Thomas’s Battersea, the school George attends, bans kids from having best friends, Marie Claire reports. Instead, teachers encourage all students to form bonds with one another to avoid creating feelings of exclusions among those without best friends.

Jane Moore, a parent whose child attends the school, explained the idea on a recent episode of the British talk show “Loose Women.” “There’s a policy,” she said, “that if your child is having a party — unless every child is invited — you don’t give out the invites in class.”

If you are considering a career in teaching, and you’re weighing up between Primary and High School, I strongly urge you to choose Primary school.

The following are my reasons why:

1. Debunking the Myth – Most High School teachers say they chose the upper years because they felt the older kids would provide them with a greater level of sophistication, and the communication would therefore be more interesting and thoughtful. The implication with this theory is that the younger kids are babies and their teachers have to dumb everything down. This is patently false. I am constantly blown away by my students. They have great ideas, engage in wonderfully rich conversations and don’t require that condescending sing-song “baby talk” rubbish that a lot of teachers unsuccessfully employ.

2. Primary Teachers are Not Dumb – “You only chose Primary Teaching because your literacy and numeracy levels don’t extend past 6th Grade.” High School teachers seem to proffer this view, and sometimes they are right. But for the most part, Primary teachers chose to teach younger children after careful consideration.

3. Consistency – One grade, all day for the entire year. That is the formula for success. Whilst a high school teacher tends to have multiple classes on their books, a Primary Teacher usually has one class that they can nurture and concentrate on. This makes progress much easier and gives the teacher enormous prominence in a student’s life.

4. They Can Change – The trick with teaching is to influence your students to make good decisions before the bad habits have been set in concrete. The problem with High School teachers is that it is often too late to change their students’ skill levels and attitude issues. They are already too far behind or too resistant to change. Primary school students are far more malleable. You can turn them around and be the catalyst for improved results educationally, socially and behaviourally.

5. More Variety – High School teachers are forced to select one or two subjects only. That’s it for them. This can be get quite dry and after a few years, can become extremely repetitious. Primary School teachers teach everything. In a given day I can be teaching Maths, English, Science, Geography, History and Art. All with the same students! This variety is a wonderful thing for teachers who care more about helping children than what subject they are most attached to.

6. Laughter – The best classrooms are filled with laughter. High School classrooms with laughter often owes its amusement to a negative trigger such as sarcasm or teasing. Students are more likely to laugh at a teacher that with her at High School level. At Primary School level, good, clean, innocent humor is a must! The students always seem up for it and it can do wonders for both class and teacher.

So, my advice to all prospective High School teachers is to quickly make the switch before it’s too late.